All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Fri, 30 Aug 2024
(0:00) Bestie intros: Buttons are back for fall (1:48) Reid Hoffman joins the show, reminiscing on PayPal stories with Sacks (7:52) State of AI: Nvidia, cluster buildouts, competition (19:51) OpenAI's corporate structure and thoughts on Elon's lawsuit (29:09) Inflection AI's deal structure with Microsoft, Lina Khan's impact on the tech industry (41:27) Reid's perspective on Kamala being hot swapped for Biden, funding groups that attempted to keep RFK Jr. off ballots (52:02) Reid's thoughts on growing antisemitism (55:03) Thoughts on Kamala's economic proposals: price caps, wealth tax, etc. (1:04:19) How Silicon Valley views both candidates, why Reid funded legal action against Trump (1:19:03) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins the show and recaps his campaign and decision to back Trump (1:31:13) Falling out with the Democratic Party (1:37:26) Potential role in the Trump Administration, Make America Healthy Again agenda (1:58:01) Sacks recaps RFK Jr's campaign, RFK Jr. on Trump's legacy Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Reid Hoffman: https://x.com/reidhoffman Follow Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-second-quarter-fiscal-2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gavin-baker-ai-semiconductors-and-the-robotic-frontier/id1154105909?i=1000666758592
Welcome back to the all in podcast, the number one business technology and political podcast in the world. I am your host, Jay Cal, Jason Calacanis. And with us today, three of my besties. You got David Friedberg cackling over there. He is your sultan of science, previously known as the queen of quinoa, but he sold the quinoa business, made a killing in quinoa.
Also with us back from Italy, back from Italy, Chamath Palihapitiya. He's at 67% button. And he's not happy about it. But the hair looks great. You still got a little sea salt from the yachting.
I think I'm going to try to keep my hair long. Let's see what happens.
Did you bring any of the sea salt back with you from the Mediterranean? Put it in a little bottle to spray or no?
but I do have some mineral oil.
Oh, okay. Great. And have you showered in the last week or is it still, you got the Mediterranean glove?
Every day I've showered since I've gotten back.
See, that's the problem. You were showering in the Mediterranean.
You don't have the sea to use as a natural, you know, disinfectant and deodorant.
Exfoliant.
Exfoliant also.
Yeah. Look how many buns he's got going. I know. It's just tragic. I feel uncomfortable for your neck. I mean, it's like creeping all the way up. Your neck looks like a prisoner.
I walked here, but I had it totally unbuttoned and I thought this is completely inappropriate for Menlo Park in August. So I buttoned two buttons.
Back in business mode. He's in business casual mode. He went from casual... To business. Okay. And with us, of course, the Dark Knight himself. Yeah, the Rain Man, David Sachs. And we have a bestie guestie for you folks. Friend of my other pod, This Week in Startups, Reid Hoffman is here. And you know him as a venture capitalist board member at Microsoft.
And you were the co-founder or the founder of LinkedIn? I don't know if you had a co-founder.
Co-founder.
Co-founder of LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. He's got his own podcast, Masters of Scale. And he and David Sachs work together at PayPal. Welcome to the program. And give us a little story. What is your fondest memory or the most quirky memory? David Sachs and all those weirdos. I'm sorry. I'm not supposed to use the word weird anymore. I get banned on X.
All of those unique personalities at PayPal. Tell us about that moment in time. And do you remember the first time you met David Sacks?
Yeah, I met David because Peter had known him from Stanford and hired him in. And David very quickly, because he has a strong learning curve as he plays these things, kind of got the instinct of what the game we were playing with PayPal was. And it's part of the reason why I think each of the execs have had kind of key contributions to making you know, kind of PayPal successful.
And David's was this kind of like maniacal focus on the kind of the cycle of how the product worked on eBay. And like, there was just a whole bunch of stuff I learned from him. It's part of how I track, you know, kind of you know, people I respect is what do I learn from them? And that was one of the things that I would say I learned from David at PayPal. That's nice.
David, tell us your first memory of meeting Reid Hoffman. Would you remember where you were? Do you remember the conversation?
Yeah, I think when we met through Peter, you know, and Reid, I think Reid was on the board of, it was Confinity back then and then joined full time.
What were you like, 28, 27, 29? No, I mean, let's see. This would have been-
I guess I would have been 27 when I first joined PayPal, 27, 28, I guess something like that. Yeah, 99, so whatever that was. In any event, I mean, I'll just return the compliment. PayPal had all these existential issues where you had these larger entities trying to kill us. Visa, MasterCard, eBay, who else? Yeah. Oh, the lust goes on city bank. Yeah.
And Reed was kind of our emissary who kept all these dogs at bay and managed to, I guess, be friends with them, I guess, to some degree, even though they wanted to kill us. And Reed was kind of in charge of making sure that these existential issues didn't blow up on us. And they didn't. So we got pretty lucky there.
It's the Will Rogers line. It's politics is the art of saying nice doggy while you hunt for a stick.
Tell us like a moment read that is incredibly memorable to you from that PayPal era, you know, some existential moment or one of the more difficult or funny moments, late night moments that would be indicative of that era and whatever was in the water that drew all that talent to one place.
Well, part of it is that, and this is, you know, among the things I was learning from Peter, was that Peter and Max recruited just a tremendous focus on intense learning curves. So it was one of the things that Peter later was like, okay, I guess you have to interview for being on sports teams and so forth, because this teamwork thing does matter, but like high performers.
And it was kind of like a, and that was part of the reason why there was such intense learning curves you know, kind of innovation and capability. You know, probably the most stunning memory I had at PayPal is we, you know, we're all young, we're all, first time we're kind of doing a startup that matters, you know, kind of making this stuff happen.
And we do this merger with x.com and, you know, like pre the merger closing, You know, Elon is saying, oh, I got this CEO, Bill Harris. He's the best ever. That's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to x.com and the merger, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
And then after the merger, literally the first meeting I had with Elon is Bill Harris is a complete disaster. We need to fire him right away. Like before we get to the first board meeting, we need him fired. And I'm like, Uh, Elon, you need to talk to Peter about this.
Well, I mean, he is decisive, that's for sure. All right, well, let's get into it. We want, you know, we're going to go a little bit mullet here, Friedberg. We're going to start with business and then maybe we'll have a...
Yes, exactly.
Oh, yes, the legendary Antonio's Nuthouse.
And when Bill eventually did meet his demise at PayPal, it was called the Nuthouse Coup.
He got whacked at the Nuthouse? Were the pool tables in the back he whacked at or in the books in the front?
Well, he was whacked at a board meeting, not at the Nuthouse, but certain plans were formulated at the back of Antonio's Nuthouse.
Antonio's Dunn House is, yeah, the most unhygienic bar in the Bay Area. And then that's a pretty low benchmark. Let's just leave it at that. We'll start with some business here, talk a little AI. And then since two of our panelists have a passion We'll do the party, political parties, at the end.
Everybody knows Reid was a co-founder of Inflection AI and as a general partner at Greylock and one of the founding investors also in OpenAI. There's a good story there, I'm sure. And we just got results, Reid, from NVIDIA. Results were good. They beat across the board. Stock was down after hours. Analysts said probably profit-taking.
Putting that aside, we've never seen a chart like this in the history of business, I would say. Data center revenue, 26.3 billion, 87% of their revenue now. You remember NVIDIA started obviously with video games and didn't have a major data center business. That has exploded. Net income, 16.6 billion. Gross margin, 75%. And here's your chart.
On a total basis, NVIDIA's revenue scale up is basically unlike anything we've seen. But if you look, their quarter-over-quarter revenue over the past couple of years, things are starting to cool off significantly after that giant boom. Bree, what's your take on NVIDIA's just incredible run here? Is it sustainable? Will they have competitors?
And do you think this build-out, this massive build-out we're seeing from startups to sovereigns to Microsoft, which you're on the board of, Google, Apple, et cetera, is this sustainable and is this going to keep going?
Well, I got asked that question unsurprisingly by many public market investors over the year. And I basically told them and say, hey, look, it's sustainable for two years, which for you guys means forever. Yeah. Eight full quarters. Yes, exactly. So that's infinity, right, in terms of time.
You know, NVIDIA has a very sharp, you know, kind of lead on the importance of the chips for the training clusters. You know, they're effective on inference. But I do think that as you kind of scale the demand, there'll be a lot of inference chips coming in. You know, I think... Chamath, you're invested in one of those.
And I think there's going to be a bunch of those kind of coming in and the bulk of the demand will be on the inference side. And then NVIDIA will have this challenge of, do I try to keep my prices and my margin? Or do I do what, why we like competition? Do I have to respond to the competitive market?
And then that I think will play out, you know, start playing out probably in a year, two at the latest. and then kind of go. So I think it's not sustainable. The pure heat is not sustainable, but I think it's, you know, NVIDIA's got a very strong position and, you know, I definitely, I would recommend people not be short on NVIDIA. Yeah.
So yeah, there's growth left, competition is coming. And this is probably not the type of stock you would want to short at this moment in time. Freeberg, what are your thoughts on this build out, as well as the software build out that's occurring? And when do you think we're going to see some competition come into the space?
I don't know if there's competition in the build-out. I think we talked about this in the past. And I don't know if you guys saw these quotes this week or recently on, we don't think about this build-out in terms of ROI. Gavin Baker in conversation on Invest Like the Best, is that the name of the podcast? Yeah.
I think referenced some conversations he's been having with the leaders of these companies regarding the build-out is so important because ultimately, if you create this, quote, digital god, the return is how many trillions. So it doesn't matter how many tens of billions you're spending each quarter right now. You have to get there. You have to make sure you don't miss the boat.
I guess, Reid, a question for you. You're on the board of Microsoft still, right? Yes, indeed. Has Microsoft or Satya publicly talked about how they rationalize the investing principles associated with building out AI infrastructure in the cloud? Is it ROI based? Like, hey, in the next two years, we're going to make this much additional incremental operating profit?
Or is it like, hey, we got to get this thing working?
Right, right. To be more precise, is the investment driven by ROI? Or does everyone just say, this is so strategic, we just have to win it and we'll throw all the resources we have to at this?
Well, one, board members speaking for Microsoft is forbidden. So I'm not speaking for Microsoft, just speaking for me.
Two- All cloud computing platform companies, what's your sense on how they're thinking about it?
It's just one of the principles in the Microsoft thing is the company speaks for itself, board members don't speak for them. But I think Satya is the best public market CEO of our generation. I think he is stunning in kind of blending common combination of strategic insight with also kind of being kind of return on capital, sensible risk taking, et cetera.
The actual thing between your guys' questions in terms of, because I can comment on how Satya thinks with this stuff, is he's both thinking about it's a platform change and you have to be there for the platform change, for productivity, for cloud, et cetera. And, okay, let's rationalize the capital to when are we expecting revenue?
How do we get revenue sooner to have that as a good productive cycle? How do we be not trying to just spend like drunken sailors, which is easy to do, but to be targeting business outcomes.
And it's part of the reason why he's very focused on what are we doing with Office, what are we doing with Cloud, what are we doing with... As opposed to... You rarely hear him talking about AGI or never digital gods because it's kind of the question of I am focused on this in a business sense. And I think that's kind of the way he's doing it. But there is obviously a...
you know, kind of a, it's hard to predict the future when it's novel and unknown in platforms. And it's part of the reason why you have all the hyperscalers now, you know, kind of fully engaged and intelligently engaged.
Because if you say, well, if even it's just the new platform by which, you know, kind of software, everything with a computer unit in it, whether it's a phone or a speaker or a computer or anything else, Anything with a kind of a CPU or a GPU gets more intelligent. You can't miss out on that platform. And so that's, I think, the thing that's motivating everybody.
But it's obviously how to do that smart is one of the things that everybody is, I'd say, obsessing about every week.
What do you think about the open source movement versus closed source? You were one of the original donators to OpenAI. You were originally on the board. And there's a couple of ways to go with this question, but I just want to start with Forget about the corporate structure over there. We'll get to that in a second. But I want to talk specifically about open source.
Meta's obviously far behind OpenAI, far behind Google, Microsoft. So they went open source. When you're behind, you go open source, I guess is the idea here. But they're making some big progress. Who do you think is going to win this ultimately? An open source provider of LLMs or proprietary closed source like OpenAI is? And it's confounding to say OpenAI is closed, but closed AI.
Yeah. Look, from the very founding of OpenAI, I was never claiming it was going to be open source. I was claiming it was going to be one safety open access and not differential or controlling access for that. And I think they've stayed true to that principle, which is, I think, what the genesis of the word open is there.
And look, I think the key thing is there's going to be winners all over the place. I think there's going to be winners in the open source side.
And I don't know if Lama is going to win from its open source thing as much as it's just trying to say, hey, we're training these models, so we're going to put them out there because our closed system, closed loop, doesn't require selling for tokens and so forth. But there's also Mistral and other folks who are doing competent models
And then I think that the, but you know, there'll be wins in different ways. So it's not like, I think like for example, you know, I think there's going to be a bunch of different startups they're going to win, whether it's coding agents or, you know, kind of very specific applications within medical or other kinds of things. And I think they will, you know, generate big companies.
And I think large companies like, you know, the hyperscalers are going to succeed as well. Now in the pure model competition, The question is, when do we start seeing a asymptote to scale? And my guess is, and kind of the GPT landmarks is each order of magnitude, my guess is the soonest will be GPT-6. And it may even be after that.
And that's part of what the bet that OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers are all making is that that return to scale. And then that has a lot of downstream effects because even if you say we can train smaller models to do effective things, part of what's going to be really instrumental for training those smaller models is the larger models.
So even if there's a bunch of smaller models that are specifically capturing other kinds of market opportunities, which is part of what I've been doing and investing in AI since 2014, 2015, there's going to be a set of those things that are all a whole bunch of startup opportunities.
So I think that the A versus B is a good dramatic framing, but it's really on which specific opportunities, because there's going to be wins and opportunities across them.
Sorry, just real quick. Do you think there's one LLM or one foundational model read that effectively does everything like a meta model that starts to take most of the market or does different... versions of smaller models or small agents that kind of network together, end up being the best solution for specific applications and verticals. Like how does this evolve over time?
Like everyone's got this concept that there's a God model that does everything and wins. And whoever gets the God model wins everything. But the reality of software and principles of biology would indicate that you'll see like smaller network things that are better at doing things than any one big thing. And I'm curious to hear your point of view on the philosophy of that.
Yeah. I think the mistake that people make is they think precisely it's like the one model to rule them all. It's like Sauron's ring. And actually, in fact, already today, like for example, one of the things that
happens with all the model providers at Microsoft and OpenAI, which I've seen, is they'll sometimes sub in, like GPD 3.5, as it was before, to see what the answers are, because there's a cost of compute. Even as you learn to bring the cost of the compute of the larger models down, the larger models are always going to be a lot more expensive.
And by the way, they're going to be more expensive kind of probably loosely on the order of magnitude, right? So it's like, well, it's 10x larger, it's 10x more expensive. And so when you're trying to say, hey, I'm trying to make business models work,
Or language translation, right? If I just want to do language translation, I don't need a massive model. I just need a model that's really good at language translation. Exactly.
And so what I think you're going to see is networks of models and like kind of traffic control and escalation and all the rest. And agents are not going to be one model. They're going to be blends of models. And that's one of the reasons why you say, well, there's actually, in fact, a lot of room for startups. Because it's not like we say, well, we take GPT-7 and we just serve it for everything.
It's like, well, it's going to be super expensive. And there's a whole bunch of things about serving it more cheaply. And for example, one of the really great technical papers that I love from Microsoft is, all you need is textbooks.
It's like you can train very specific models on kind of like high quality data, along with, by the way, the larger model helping train it, that all of a sudden you have a functional smaller model. And, you know, the question will be a blend of these things. So I think the multi-model approach is, I think, going to be, you know, quickly universal.
What is your take on IP in this new era? We see OpenAI, and you're not on the OpenAI board anymore, right? So you're independent of that, even though you made a big donation at some point.
Donation and investment. I led the first commercial series, first commercial round.
So you're an investor in it, and you donated to it. Actually, let's start there. What's up with that? corporate structure. How do we make sense of that? Something's a nonprofit, you donated to it, and then you invested in it, and everybody's making money and selling in secondary at $100 billion. How does that work in the world?
So it's a 501c3 is the governor thing, that's what started. And when Elon and Sam were starting this and said, look, we need philanthropic support, and we're trying to make sure that there is open access to AI, which is gonna be an instrumental technology, and we've got some great technologists who wanna come do this, we started as a 501c3 for doing it. That persists, as far as I know, till today.
Then one of Sam Altman's pieces of genius was that he kind of said, look, we're gonna need scale capital and I'm trying to go out to raise, and the commercial round was 600 million, I'm trying to raise 600 million in philanthropy and it's not working. So I have this idea, which is the 501c3, which is doing this kind of research mission of AGI for humanity is also producing commercial benefits.
And we can create initially an LP, which has a kind of a revenue right on the commercial things that investors can invest in. And Reed, it'd be really helpful if you led this because, and I was like, well, but you don't have a go-to-market plan. You don't have a... product plan, business plan. He's like, yeah, but we need to show that we're actually serious with the business.
And I said, all right, fine, I will lead it from my foundation. Because even though none of these things we like to see as investors were there, but I was like, look, okay, I'll lead it as an investment, I'll manage it as an investment, but I'll do it as an investment for my foundation in order to do this.
And, and what, you know, you know, kind of that was kind of as we were beginning to get into, you know, like, kind of, we, we hadn't seen anything, they were still doing Dota and, and robot hands and much of this. So it was like, we're betting on the scale thesis of generating something magical. And so we hadn't seen GPT-3 yet.
And of course, once that started coming, then it was like, well, we need a bunch more capital, let's do a strategic strategy. you know, connection and let's talk to all the hyperscalers and let's work out a deal by which one of them invests in us. And then, you know, the Microsoft Open AI deal came together with, you know, converting the LP into a subsidiary of the nonprofit.
kind of saying, look, there's all kinds of benefits that both OpenAI and Microsoft can get from a business deal. And so that's what's led to the structure that I was familiar with before I left the board.
What did you think of Elon's first lawsuit, and then he dropped it, and then he refiled? Where do you think he's coming from?
Well, what is the, I'm not very charitable about those lawsuits. I would like to be, because Elon's one of the entrepreneurial heroes of our time and generation. But I think it's the, I think it's, you know, frankly, I think probably the most charitable thing to say is sour grapes. Because, you know, for example, I know Sam offered him as much of the investment round as he wanted, right?
Like he could have done the whole thing. He could have let it, you know, it was kind of like, hey, look, we still love you. And he was like, no, it's not a company that I control. It's going to fail. So I'm not interested in investing. And I was like, okay, right. And so now you're getting these lawsuits that are like, you know, like I was misled.
And it was like, you were offered everything at every opportunity other than converting OpenAI into a company that you completely owned. And so, you know, I think it's without basis, without merit.
But why do you think he would have dropped it and then refiled? Where do you think that comes from? Is there new information, do you think?
I think it was a jurisdiction issue, Jamal. Oh, that makes sense. I can track that.
But, Reid, I mean, Elon put in the first, what, $44 million, and he doesn't have any shares. Yeah.
I, by the way, put in $10 million at the same time, and I don't have any shares from those $10 million.
But do you think that he kind of got screwed because he doesn't have any shares? I mean, at the time he put in the $44 million, it was never going to be a for-profit. Now it's a for-profit. A lot of people are profiting, assuming the paper mark ends up being realized. So he doesn't own anything.
I mean, if you were the seed investor and put up $44 million in something and then everyone's making money and you don't have any shares, forget about the legal technicalities. Wouldn't you have a feeling of being screwed?
Well, look, I can understand the emotion of that, but it's not like Elon's short of money, right? And so if you go, look, I'd like to have shares like I did, invest in the other thing. I didn't get any shares for the 10 million that I put in. And by the way, it's not just legal technicalities. It's actually really important that you're not doing private enrichment off philanthropic donations.
And so, you know, it's... But isn't that what's happened? No, from a viewpoint of... they're held separate, right? And so, you know, and the 501 continues to control the, you know, kind of control the kind of the mission and destiny and so forth.
And so the question about its mission is still guiding things and you're essentially investing in that mission and you recruited people, you know, on that mission. And so, you know, I think that the, you know, you know, I think, like I said, sour grapes,
Okay, so let's get into some political stuff. First, I want to get the IP question, then I want to talk about Lina Khan. So how do you think about IP in this, you know, briefly in this new world? OpenAI and New York Times can't come to terms. New York Times caught them red-handed, cookie jar, according to their lawsuit, having indexed a ton of their content.
It's pretty crystal clear that their content's behind a paywall, and that's how they make money. I also subscribe to ChatGPT. I give them 20 bucks a month, maybe 30 bucks a month for every employee in my firm. And I get New York Times content from there all the time. I will ask it, what is the wire cut I think is the best choice in chat GPT? I get that. And then I get the answer.
And I don't need my New York Times subscription. I don't visit the New York Times anymore. Feels pretty clear cut to me. But how do you think about IP? Should an LLM be able to ingest whatever they please? Or should they be required to get permission in advance and pay a royalty to content creators? Reid Hoffman.
Well, as a content creator too. Look, I think that it tends to be a little bit of a, we do want content creators to benefit economically from the work. It's part of the reason why we have copyright. It's part of the reason why we have payrolls, you know, other kinds of things that I think are very important. And I think it's a complicated thing that needs to be sorted out.
Now, that being said, I think we also want to say that we can train these models, like, you know, like training is like reading and like reading things is, you know, like when something's available to be read and you've engaged in the right economic thing for reading it, I think that's a kind of a reasonable fair use thing.
Now maybe we update the terms of service, maybe we update copyright law and other things to say, okay, that now changes. I think we don't want to forbid changes in the future. This is one of the problems we get, it blocks innovation when we do that. It blocks innovation in kind of Hollywood, it blocks innovation in music, it blocks innovation. So you want to allow some new changing landscape.
And I think this is a changing landscape that arguably is reading. So I think that, Both of those things are true in terms of what do we want to sort through. I think that one of the reasons why this is kind of like, when I give advice to various news organizations and so on, I say, look, don't try to hold out for money on the training side of things.
because we're gonna create synthetic data, we're gonna do all kinds of other things that are gonna mean that no one's particular data is really going to matter. What you should be is on freshness, on brand, on other things, and we should work out ongoing sustaining economic arrangements like that. That would be my two cents suggestion for it. And I do think we wanna design an ecosystem
that includes that, and when I was involved in those conversations at OpenAI, they agreed with that. Microsoft certainly agrees with that in terms of how do we make sure that economics are fairly apportioned and so forth for what we're doing for this phase of, and ongoing, but there's a current new technological wave that's coming, and how do you do that?
So that's a messy answer, but unfortunately it's a messy subject.
It's a pretty messy subject, yeah.
Before we move to politics, I just wanted to actually ask you about inflection. So is it still running? Yeah. And so what basically happened, there was like some transfer payment from Microsoft and a couple of the people like, and then it seems like whatever that deal was, a little bit seems to have been copied by Google when they did this character AI thing.
So just trying to get a sense from you, are these deals to structurally avoid FTC scrutiny in terms of the building blocks of it? Or how did you think about it? And what is the pattern and the trend on these things?
Well, the thing I think that's happened was, you know, very early days, you had things like, you know, we're doing an agent and if Pi had launched before ChatGBT, it'd probably be in a different circumstance, but like ChatGBT got the, oh my God.
I'm sorry, Pi is the inflection AI product.
Pi is the inflection agent, yeah. And so by the time that Pi, we got the trend right and the interest of the market right, but we got the timing, you know, too late, happens with startups. So it was like, okay, we need to pivot. We need to pivot from a B2C model to a B2B.
And we have a unique model, but let's sell that to other people who already have audiences, because we're not going to be able to easily grow our audience. And then, you know, once we had that as a conversation, there were employees like, well, we want to do the direct agent thing, and that's what we want to do. And maybe we'll go somewhere in order to do that.
And we're like, okay, how do we fund this? And how do we make that work? And how do we make it work for investors? And we said, hey, there's a deal structure that could work, which is with a kind of outside party, you can get paid enough in a non-exclusive IP license and an ability to selectively hire folks. And then you can dividend some of that out to investors.
So investors get back kind of a 1X and then kind of an ongoing position. So as investors, it's great to have a kind of optionality on its B2B business in order to play that out. And this is a structure that works for everybody in this pivot to B2B. And that's essentially the structure that we did. I see.
Great pivot, Chamath, into Lena Kahn. I think one of the things that is quite paradoxical about your relationship with David Sachs is you both agree on something in politics, which is Lena Kahn, And her concepts around future competition and maybe how she's running this issue for the United States is leading to basically a freeze on the market.
We're seeing weird deal structures like some of the ones we're talking about here that could have just been acquisitions. And I'm curious your thoughts on What she, you know, this sort of breakup of Google, now we're seeing that emerge at the same time that they're facing the biggest existential crisis of their career, which is language models competing with them.
And I mean, I would say half of my Google searches have already moved to chat GPT-like services. So what's your take on Lena Kahn's approach to M&A? And what impact, if it's continued and sustained, will that have on capital allocation? Because I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market, but it seems to be completely gone.
Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen. So what's your take?
So it was funny, because I kind of made an off-the-cuff, you know, kind of remark about Lena Kang, which turned into a whole news cycle.
I saw you on CNN where they were like, are you telling Kamala and Biden what they have to do?
And I'm like, no, because I don't believe in that kind of corruption of politics. The only way she's going to learn about it is either she asks me or she watches this television show. And so... So she's done a good job on the price cartels, she's done a good job on the anti-competes, both of which I think are very good for competitive markets.
The problem is I think she has a misunderstanding of these large tech companies. And for example, on the M&A thing, her theory is you gotta prevent the aggregation of power, so you gotta fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.
It's just like, okay, part of the returns is if I'm going to invest in something that might be competing with one or more of the large tech companies, I need to have acquisition exits as part of being able to fund enough capital to really make that acquisition, that investment possible. Because if it doesn't work, I want to be able to at least recover my capital by an investment.
So the right way to look at it is, is there competition amongst the top tech companies. Because if one of them is like squashing all the other ones, that's a problem. If we're five large tech companies heading to three, then I'm much more sympathetic to our point of view. But we're actually five heading to 10, right? Or five to seven heading to 12.
Because like Nvidia is now in the mix and others I think are coming in the mix.
Tesla is now over 500 billion, yeah.
Yes, and so you have this ability. So the thing is, is they're competing on the acquisitions just like they're competing in the marketplace.
And if you're trying to quell the whole thing, because your theory is like they should just, you know, the startup should just be able to grow up to compete, that actually means that those will never get the capital that they need in order to do that, which means you're actually having the opposite of your intent, right? What you're doing is you're actually making there be less competition
Because, you know, capitalists can't say, if I'm gonna put 100 million, 500 million, a billion dollars into this company, I at least have a chance of getting my capital back, or I can possibly create a competitor. And that's the reason I was speaking out against it as an expert. It was interesting.
I saw you, I think it was a Jake Tapper who kind of grilled you on it. I thought you did an exceptional job of just saying, listen, I made a donation. This is how I feel about it. But obviously, she's going to do what she wants to do. And that's just how politics works. So I thought that was actually pretty well done.
And I actually appreciate you fighting for more M&A because it would be great for the industry. Zach, you want to throw up a political topic here or you want me to- Well, no, just to stick on Lena Kahn for a second.
So I agree that her approach has been overly broad and has had a chilling effect on M&A. And so, J. Cal, like you said, we've lost those base hit- acquisitions that I think are important to the venture capital market that help new startups get funded. I mean, if the returns on risk capital go down, there's going to be less of it. Yeah, so I agree with Reid on that.
The area where I'm not sure we agree is, and where I do agree with Lina Khan, is I do think the big tech companies have too much power. I do think that they are monopolies or have monopolies And I do think they need to be controlled. I just think that, you know, I wouldn't prevent them from doing any M&A whatsoever.
I'm curious if Reid, like, agrees with that, that the big tech companies have too much power or agrees with Lena Kahn on that. And I guess specifically, do you think any big tech companies should be broken up? If so, which ones? I mean, I would actually entertain that idea of deconglomerating or breaking up some of these big tech companies.
Do you think, do you agree that big tech is too much power or not?
I think it's TBD. But the reason I'd take the opposite point of view and say no, the thesis for no is that they are very strong American companies that get, in most cases, over half the revenue from overseas. They create technology platforms that beneficially differentiate the US versus many other countries in kind of global circumstances like the internet and other kinds of things.
I think that they are competing ferociously with each other. You know, Jason just mentioned that, you know, it's kind of like, look, we've already got like chat GPT competing with Google search and other kinds of things. And I think it's competitive pressure, right? This is, I think what capitalism is about is competitive pressure that essentially creates the thing.
And that's the reason why, like, if it's, if, if we were shrinking, like it was Google Uber Alice, or I actually frankly think that the, Everyone likes to talk about Google. I think the prime candidate is likely to be, and I'm speaking as an individual and as a venture capitalist here, is Apple with the App Store, right?
Okay, so wait. So that brings up an interesting point. One of the things we've talked about in this pod is that we shouldn't shut down M&A, but the FTC should limit anti-competitive tactics by these big tech companies. Yep. Apple, really good example because they drive everything through the app store. You're not allowed to do side loading. They want to take, what is it, 30% piece of any sales.
You're not even allowed to have a link inside an application to drive the user to the website. Except in Europe now.
Yeah. In Europe now, you can.
So would you at least want to crack down on those anti-competitive tactics? Yeah.
Yeah, no, for sure. And look, especially when, you know, we all know it's nonsense. It's like, look, you could just give the consumers the option to allow sideloading. You could just say, it's technically very simple to do. And you can say, look, we don't want you to sideload because we view it to be safety and security, but we're giving you the option, right? Fine, give people the option, right?
Right.
Reid, were you surprised that then the first target where there was like some successful antitrust pushback was against Google versus Apple? And then second, do you think that there's a chance, like a meaningful chance that the government tries to break Google up? Or do you think it looks something maybe more similar to what happened to Microsoft?
So I think in mandating breakups... you know, like I think is a, look, I think we should operate through competitive networks and competitive ecosystems. I think it's part of what's smart about capitalism. And I think mandating breakups is only when essentially capitalism is failing on specific things. You wanna do the least,
the least you can to get back to competitive networks in terms of how you're operating. And so when you say, hey, look, iOS has this kind of monopoly, and you say there's no side loading, you have to use App Store, you have to use the payment mechanism, et cetera, et cetera, it's like, well, that quells a ton of startup innovation.
We all know this as investors, because we look at anyone who's prospectively doing a business like this and say, no chance, you're not going to succeed. And so then you say, well, what's the least thing that we can do, right? And, you know, a classic Andy Truss was like, well, let's break off the app store from Apple as well, right? Unclear that that would really fully work.
You know, that's like socialism mandating how the thing should work. Let's try to get it so that we allow competition to determine these things. And like, for example, saying, hey, like you have to allow consumers the option of sideloading. You have to allow consumers the option of installing an alternative app store, right? Like that kind of stuff. I think, you know, what's the minimal set?
I think that's the kind of intervention we want to have because I think there's all kinds of benefits that come from- But why do you think that the case against Apple has made less progress than the case against Google? I think it's less politically easy, right?
It's kind of like everybody loves their iOS phone and there's less of a blue and red kind of combo tackle where the blue feet people are like, hate big companies. Apple's less offensive, basically. Yes.
More stylish. They're prettier. I kind of like your approach, though, with the App Store. If you were to think of least harm to the ecosystem, Epic Games has their own App Store for games. They charge 88%. I'm sorry, they give developers 88%. They only take 12. And forcing Apple to allow a startup to do an App Store would solve the entire problem. And it seems like that's where it's going to go.
And all five of us would invest instantly in an App Store that would say 0%. take rate, and all advertising based. What a great idea that would be.
Yeah, exactly. Reid, I have a question. A few weeks ago, you said something to the effect very publicly that you had had a one hour or multi hour lunch with Biden. And he just seemed like super on his game. And then he was kind of dumped. Was that just a moment in time where he was really great with you?
Or how do you reconcile that with Pelosi and all of these other folks and what happened to Biden?
Well, like most of us, I was pretty dismayed by the debate performance.
Because when I talked to him, detailed, thoughtful analysis with no notes on Gaza, questions about AI, and what kinds of things, what did I think about what the progress, the thing they were doing with the voluntary commitments, the executive order, and what kinds of things should happen in the future, and all that kind of stuff, being on the game a little slower, Right.
Then then, you know, a 50 year old would be. But but, you know, like cogent and totally worth it. And then you kind of looked at the debate, oh my gosh, this is a disaster. And so it was like, look, is the debate a one-off thing? Were you ill?
Like trying to reconcile the two and spent a little bit of time trying to figure that out to what was going on because it was the first time I'd seen something like that. And, you know, you know, I don't you know, I'm not enough of a D.C.
insider to know exactly what the set of conclusions were other than I, you know, I plotted, you know, Biden for having the kind of integrity to go, look, I'm maybe I'm ill, maybe I'm old, maybe I'm slower, but. You know, it's about the country more than it's about me because I'm, you know, not, you know, it's important to be about the country, not about yourself. I'll step aside.
And ultimately, it's a decision. There's nothing that anyone can force. Pelosi couldn't force it on anyone else. It's ultimately his decision. He came to that decision. So, you know, I applaud that.
Do you think that they should have run an open primary after that? And would Kamala have won an open primary?
Well, it's hard to know. I mean, I think they were definitely leaning towards an open primary, and then all the people who would be the most natural contenders all endorsed Kamala. And by the way, you say, well, kind of democratic process. It was like, well, there was a democratic process that picked the Biden-Harris ticket, which turned into the Harris-Waltz ticket.
And so that's not anti-democratic. But I think if you look at the sequence of events, it was kind of like, well, you know, we're going to sort out, you know, what we're going to do. And then, you know, all of the key folks, you know, Shapiro and Whitmer and everyone else all endorsed Kamala. I was like, okay, let's just, let's get back to, you know, kind of the choice of two candidates.
And so I, you know.
Do you feel the voters felt, Reed, do you think the voters felt left out? the Democratic voters?
Well, I mean, from post fact, seems not, right? With the level of kind of energy and all the rest, it seems that with the pure polling and kind of level energy and kind of what's going on. They're happy with what they got. Yeah, they're happy with what they got.
I would have liked to have that speed run. Do you think it sets a bad precedent that there were these back room conversations? Obviously, The staff of Whitmer, Moore, Shapiro, their office speaks with Democratic Party leadership, speak with big donors.
And there was effectively a coalescing that took place over a period of time that said, we should all stand behind and endorse one person instead of infighting and creating a split in the party. And does that not set a bad precedent that there is a small group of people in either party...
that in a primary process effectively get to nominate their candidate, get their candidate to become the nominee. And therefore there's only two people for the country to choose from. And as we have seen recently with RFK Jr. and the lawsuits against him in being on the ballot in different states, it makes it very difficult maybe for the people to have their choice.
And is that a bad way for democracy to work? And I just love your philosophical view on this. I'm like, what's the best way for democracy in the United States to work?
so for the president for the president yes we do live in a republic all right and there are there is various like you know some people have much more influence than others um whether it's media platforms whether it's um you know economics and ability to spend whether it's you know a history and a brand and and and other things and so you know this melee and and and kind of
you know, whole integration set of things. Now, ultimately, you know, voters are going to decide in November, right? So, you know, people do have a, you know, and I think that staying to our democratic process is what's really key. Like, you know, people go on the polls.
You know, I think we should want to live in a country where everyone does, you know, everyone who is legally allowed to vote does vote. And I think that that's you know, ultimately a good thing. Now, you know, are there things that I would like to change? Sure. I'd like to change. I'd like to have ranked choice voting. You know, I'd like to have open primaries.
There's a set of things like, like actually my principal frustration in all of this stuff is, you know, what's, what's one of the fundamental things that the two parties agree on that, that, that, that shouldn't be is that there should be only two parties. Right. And I think that's, I think that's something that you, you need to fix and you can't fix it
Unfortunately, I think with independent candidates, because the whole system is really set up for kind of two parties and independent candidates are almost always spoilers one way or the other. I mean, like on the RFK stuff, I understand there was a bunch of Democrats who were trying to prevent him from getting on the ballot.
I actually prefer him on the ballot because I actually think his anti-vax stance really fit very well. with Trump. And so I think he was going to take more from Trump.
Do you want to address that, Reid? Because I think there was a rumor that you were funding some of these lawsuits to keep him off the ballot or whatever. Have you spent any money to try to impact RFK one way or the other?
I wouldn't be surprised if we look at all the money that goes to all the different organizations, if Organization X kind of had some kind of ballot thing. My voice and instruction was always like, no, no, no, don't do that. That's anti-democratic. But you can't control everything just like you invest in a company and CEO sometimes the dumb ass that you can't do anything about.
Because you give money to folks that then execute their own strategies. So you can't control on the ground tactics, right?
Yeah.
So there's that happens that you're like, no, don't do that.
Right. Well, okay. That's a good segue. Right. Let's talk about the five cases against Trump. There are five lawsuits against Trump.
Hold on, J. Cal, can we just stay on this topic for a second? I think this is important. Sure, of course you can. Okay, so in Michigan and Wisconsin, you had Democratic groups. They fought. RFK Jr. 's bid to get on the ballot. Okay, they failed. Now he wants to get off the ballot, but they won't take him off now that they think that his presence hurts Trump.
And at the same time, Michigan's trying to remove Cornel West and Wisconsin's trying to remove Jill Stein. So I'm curious, do you think there's any principle on display here besides naked partisan hackery? I mean, basically, the Democrats fought... having third parties on the ballot when they thought it would hurt Biden.
And now they want to keep them on the ballot when they think it's going to hurt Trump, except for those third party candidates who they still think will hurt Harris. So is there any principle here or is this just partisan hackery?
I think it's, I frankly think that everyone who follows the legal process to get on the ballot should be on the ballot, and we should follow the legal process. I'm very much of a legal process kind of person. What I'm opposed to is calling Raffensperger and asking for 11,000 votes, which is not legal. So yeah, sure, is that bad, and do I advocate against it? The answer is absolutely yes.
But it's – follow the legal process.
If the Secretary of State of Colorado throws Trump off the ballot, for example, is that legal process if it's then overruled by the Supreme Court? Or can we just say substantively that states shouldn't be removing candidates from the ballot? That's anti-democratic.
Well, but you want them to remove RFK from the ballot.
No, that's not what I said. Oh, OK.
I'm just trying to figure out.
No, no, no. The rule is that – well, first of all, I don't think that Democratic groups should be suing RFK to keep him off the ballot. And that's what he said is that Democratic groups were suing to keep him off the ballot and they were trying to exhaust his resources so he couldn't mount an effective campaign. And some of those groups you funded, right?
So maybe you didn't know what they were doing. But in any event, I consider that to be anti-democratic. RFK is now trying to remove his name from the ballot. I think as a candidate you're allowed to do that. And those same groups that once fought to keep him off the ballot are trying to keep his name on the ballot. Oh, really?
Yeah, because now they perceive the political calculation to be a little different. So I don't see any of this as being democratic. This to me is just partisan hackery, isn't it?
Can't you agree with that? Look, yes, fundamentally from a viewpoint of like, for example, my direct actions, and yes, you fund a whole bunch of different groups and you have different groups doing different things, but you funded them to do this thing that you were thinking of and things happen. It's just like companies.
My thing was actually, in fact, making people aware of RFK's anti-vax statement, his anti-science stuff, because I thought that would be relevant in the polls in November. That was the actual strategy that I believe. And I think that would differentially hit Trump more. And so, therefore, it would be a spoiler. right, as these independents are.
I have no problem with drawing attention to issues, but I do think fundamentally it's anti-democratic to sue third party candidates to the point where they can't be on the ballot. Okay, let me ask you directly, Cornel West. There's an effort right now to remove Cornel West from the ballot in Michigan. Do you support that or would you oppose that? I mean, is that democracy?
By default, I would oppose it. I don't know any of the details.
Okay, fair enough.
Reid, I have a question for you. It's more of a statement, actually. Maybe I'd just love to get your reaction. One of the most divisive issues that we have right now is people's position on October 7th, Israel, Palestine. There is a sense that there's a growing kind of like virulent strain of anti-Semitism in America. A lot of people point to the extreme left as where that's really gestating.
There was thoughts that Josh Shapiro would have been an exceptional candidate, but one of the large reasons why he was not really meaningfully considered was his religion.
I just want you to comment on the broad issue and whether you see it in the Democratic Party, whether you see it in the Republican Party, whether you see it at all, just give us a sense of where we stand culturally on this issue.
So I know Josh Shapiro. I think he's great. I've broken bread with him and he was meaningfully considered. I think we should be so lucky that he would run for presidency someday, some year. I actually didn't know Walt at all and was initially kind of surprised because I was like, oh, I thought it was probably going to be Shapiro.
And I was like, well, I think it was probably a close call down to those two. And it looks like in making decisions, I think Harris made a good decision with Waltz. So I think it's a... Now, on the anti-Semitism topic, I do worry that
you know, broadly, we're seeing, you know, kind of more rise of anti-Semitism and that's extremely important to fight, you know, because I think, and I think there are people in the, you know, it's a weirdly like, there's some lefties who are doing it and there's some righties who are doing it. It's both a blue and a red issue in different shape. And I think it's very important that we,
you know, we stand against that as a country. And so, you know, I've been, you know, kind of mostly just trying to say, hey, look, we gotta be anti-racism, anti-Semitism, and also anti-genocide. And we gotta figure that out.
What did you think of Kamala's handling of that issue in her speech? She basically... seemed to, I don't know, say both sides of it, but she said, hey, you can believe that the people of Gaza should be treated more humanely and that, you know, Israel has a right to defend herself.
What'd you think of her handling of that? I think that's rational, right? Like you should be anti-genocide both of Palestinians and of Jews. Right. And and like it's obviously a very, very thorny topic. Yes. Right. So so I think, you know, saying that I'm going to try to protect civilians on both sides, anti-genocide, I think that's a human caring place to be looking out for people.
Reid, do you think that, generally speaking, Marxist socialist principles are taking a firmer hold on the Democratic Party? And kind of those principles are starting to showcase not just in the cultural phenomena that Chamath is referencing, but also in some of the policymaking that's going on, and concepts of equity
rooted in concepts of social justice, ultimately rooted in Marxist principles emerging from the Industrial Revolution. What about price fixing? So as an example, the price gouging, you know, price caps on food proposal,
the concepts of a wealth tax, not necessarily the unrealized capital gains tax, but separately a tax on wealth, all of these concepts of the degradation of power structure through policy. And in part, some have argued that the antisemitism arises from these principles and that the Jews are considered a privileged and powerful cultural class. Is that not being observed?
Do you not think that there's some tendencies that are emerging in the Democratic Party and maybe influenced by a louder far left and that far left is becoming more loud and better represented in the party?
Look, I think we should speak out against both the far left and the far right. I think it's important to do both. you know, since, you know, I'm playing the Democrat here on this conversation, I'll ask you guys to play the, or especially Sachs, play the Republican and speak out against the far right too. But the short answer is, yes, there are amongst the extreme left, that's not everybody in the
misunderstandings about why it's important to defend anti-genocides like, from the river to the sea. It's like, yeah, that's a genocidal statement. Don't use that one. Understand what language you're using. And to be like, look, we've had a great genocidal moment with World War II, and we're still trying to recover from it.
Two, questions around what I think is a foolish wealth tax, even though it's, by the way, narrow to like 80%. And then on the price gouging stuff, you know, one of the things is I started scratching at it, you know, it was interesting. I think this week Kroger said, yes, we did actually artificially raise prices to profit from the pandemic, you know, and yeah, you should stop price gouging.
It's not quite the same thing as price capping. And apparently there's laws that affect even in Florida, right. Or in Texas where some of, you know, you guys are living. So like, it's kind of interesting. It's like, okay, I need to understand this issue in more depth, but I don't think it's as simplistic as the political headlines are having it.
Well, but the reason why Kamala Harris proposed the price fixing proposal, price gouging, whatever you want to call it, was in response to inflation. In other words, we've had 20% erosion in purchasing power over the last four years. Harris needs a response to that. So she came forward with this new economic proposal. So it's in that context this came up.
This wasn't some proposal by the far left of the party. unless you consider Kamala Harris to be far left, I actually do. But okay, fair enough. But my point is just, this is her proposal. And it's in response to inflation. I mean, you understand what causes inflation, right? It's like the government printing too much money. It's not greedy corporations raising their prices too much.
I mean, do you agree with that?
Look, I agree that you have to have good monetary policy. And so I think we probably agree on that. And I think some printing of money is part of the normal functioning economy, but too much is...
is bad and I don't think look I think price it look part of the reason why we just talked about antitrust stuff earlier you do have to look at places where there's a there's a possibility of kind of commanding stuff from your your privileged position and like you know the like I want to go we all agree we all agree that monopolies have to be controlled no no no debate there but that's not what's caused the inflation right because we've had inflation of commodities not just monopoly products but commodities like just food staples eggs you know
chicken, stuff like that.
Driven by fuel and labor and all the other inflationary underpinnings of those markets. And I think we tried to highlight that. I don't know if you saw Elizabeth Warren's interview on CNBC where she got taken apart because she made some claims about profiteering by Kraft Heinz. And the CNBC anchors pointed out you were actually incorrect.
Kraft Heinz has seen a reduction in profit over this period of time. And so there were factual inaccuracies in these belief systems. But for me, it feels a lot like the government setting prices in free markets is one of those steps towards socialist principles that worry me the most.
Yeah, and look, I, generally speaking, as I was saying earlier, I'm like, make sure the network sorts it out versus centralized control. Totally, totally. So it's kind of like you have to look at, is there a place where you're going, okay, that's the reason I focused, her words were price gouging.
And if you're focused on the kind of gouging side of it is like, oh, there might be a market inefficiency that you're essentially correcting, then that's I think the same kind of thing we were talking about with like the FTC and the Apple App Store and so forth. If it's like the, I'm just gonna set a fixed price on eggs, right? That's a bad idea.
And by the way, there's bad ideas like the wealth tax thing that I disagree with. Her economic thing also had housing, which I think is a good kind of thing to kind of lower costs for Americans and kind of make that kind of stable work. Like, I think she's been good on immigration.
I think the Langford Cinema bill, which was from the Republican side, was something they were fully prepared to endorse. And Trump killed it because he wanted to campaign on it. It's like, look, we care about the actual running in the country. I think there's a bunch of good things, but if you said, do I defend price capping? The answer is not as an independent principle by itself.
And by the way, are there people lefties? Like, you know, a lot of what Elizabeth Warren says about capitalism, I disagree with, right?
I mean, I could disagree with you on the border. I think, you know, Kamala... Harris used to be considered the border czar that's gotten scrubbed. I don't think she's done a great job on that, but whatever. I want to go back to issues that affect Silicon Valley. 25% unrealized gains tax. It seems like most of Silicon Valley, almost all of it, either disagrees with this or is up in arms about this.
I think, J. Cal, you said that this is disqualifying. It's a line in the sand.
It's disqualifying for me, for sure. Yeah.
So, I mean, do you agree that a large unrealized gains tax, 25%, would be a disaster for Silicon Valley and the whole startup ecosystem? Or, I mean, how do you come down on that?
Well, as I understand it, on that tax as it's proposed, is you have to have 80% of your net worth liquid.
Yeah, if 80% or more is illiquid, then... No, you get to defer the tax, but there's a penalty. Yeah, you get to defer the tax credit as a penalty. That's right.
Look, I think it's definitely a quelling impact and it's definitely stupid and definitely shouldn't happen. Okay. So it's stupid.
I think we got your position on it. It's stupid. I want to finish.
Then why isn't it disqualifying the way that J-Cal says? Are we just supposed to hope? I'll tell you why.
I'll tell you why. I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats have realized that there's actually very little difference on a lot of the major things that they actually talk about. So what they're both being forced to do is realize that because the centrality of a bunch of the things they say are the same, they each have to go to their flanks to get the N plus one vote.
And so Kamala goes to the left and spouts all this stuff that seems Marxist or socialist or communist because she has to get those people to vote for her. Ultimately, I think what ends up happening is most of the stuff in the middle has a decent chance of happening. The stuff at the fringes, I think they get put up, sacks almost as like a sacrificial lamb.
A good example, I think, is like all of this stuff that's happening with the student loan reform. A half a trillion dollar plan, it gets shot down by the Supreme Court. This new plan, another hundred billion dollars. not even being heard yet by the Supreme Court. So I think they know this. I mean, it's not like the Biden administration is dumb. The Trump administration is not dumb either.
Yeah, I mean, deporting 10 million people would be an example on the right, and taking away a woman's right to choose would be the other one.
Yeah, and by the way, one of the things— You keep bringing that up, but Trump has said that he would veto, he would not support a national ban on abortion.
Oh, no, but I'm talking about him already doing it. He already overturned what he would. I'm talking about that.
Yeah. And by the way, just returning the issue to the states, it's not outlawing abortion. And by the way, at the state level- Ask the people in Austin. You can't get abortions here in Texas. Well, but that's- Women can't make a choice here. They have not had a ballot initiative. They have not had a ballot initiative there.
Just about everywhere there's been a ballot initiative, the pro-choice forces have won. And besides, that's a state issue now, J. Cal, not federal.
Yeah, no, it's a state issue. And Trump succeeded in taking away a woman's right to choose in Texas.
But one thing, by the way, look, in the spirit of the All In podcast, I wanted to be clear about like there's stuff on the Dems and some of their economic policy for the far left people that, you know, kind of, you know, they're advocating for that I'm opposed to. You know, Sachs, I'd love to hear from you what parts of Trump's thing you're opposed to. Here we go.
Well, look, I mean, I have been consistent on this pod for years that I thought that the, let's call it the extreme pro-life side was not good for the Republican Party, and I've been opposed to it. I don't think it's what J-Cal says. I think that overturning Roe v. Wade did not abolish abortion. It basically returned the issue to the states.
And if you look at the referenda that have happened, they've pretty much all gone the pro-choice direction. So I think that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has actually allowed the country to sort of sort out that issue, although it's not completely sorted out. But look, I would not support a national abortion. I would not support re-federalizing the issue.
I think there's a lot of issues about war and peace where I do not support the, you could say the establishment neoconstrant within the party. I do not support all these interventions. I do not support these forever wars. And there is a big debate in the party about that. Now, one of the reasons why at the end of the day, I support Trump is I know this will strike some people as
counterintuitive, but I think he is the moderate within the Republican Party. He's a moderate on abortion. I know, J. Cal, you're still bitter about that Supreme Court case. However, he's been very, very clear that he will not support national abortion ban. Moreover, he took the abortion language out of the Republican platform. I think he's the moderate on issues of war.
He was the first Republican candidate to run opposing Bush's forever wars. So I give him credit on those things. On style, he may not come across as a moderate, but those are style points. I think on issues, he is the moderate. The issue I have with Kamala Harris is I don't think she's a moderate.
So just to take this 25% unrealized gains tax first, when this issue came up, we were assured, well, she doesn't really believe that, even though it was in the Democratic platform and it was in the Biden-Harris budget. Then people said, well, maybe it's part of her platform, but it's not a priority for her.
And we just had one of her top economic advisors come out on, I think it was CNBC, defending it. And her campaign confirmed that she supports it. So now the argument has become, well, she supports it. It is really part of the platform. She would do it if she could, but she's not going to be able to do it. I just don't think that's a ringing endorsement of a candidate.
I don't think you want to support a candidate because they're not going to be able to do what they really want to do.
Do you think she's a moderate or do you think she's a socialist, you know, going to take the country very far left?
By the way, what Sachs didn't address is Trump's tariff policy, which is also inflationary, almost equivalent to the price gouging, you know, food price caps. I think that they're both inflationary and they're both bad policy. That's my personal point of view. Tariffs is where I thought it was going to go. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.
Honestly, I'm not sure what I think of that proposal. I guess it depends on the details. I'm not endorsing it. I'm not opposing it. But just back to this point that should we support Kamala Harris even though we oppose all the policies that her campaign says she supports?
Because it seems like that's the argument now, is that Silicon Valley is expected to support Harris, even though she wants, and her campaign has confirmed, she wants a 44% capital gains tax. She wants a 25% unrealized gains tax. These are things that I think the vast majority of Silicon Valley considers to be disastrous for the startup ecosystem. Should we support her in spite of those things?
And why? Look, the information did an actual data poll as opposed to us being talking heads saying, we say that Silicon Valley does X or Y. And the information's poll showed that there was much broader support for the Democratic ticket than the Republican ticket.
Is that the thing that Ron Conway just tweeted? He might have. I don't know if he just tweeted. No, no, no.
That's different. That's different. That's a subset. That's a different group. That's a group to counteract you and Chamath. Throwing us fundraiser for Trump.
I think where that came from. But the information, a news source that ran a poll, did it objectively, ran the whole thing to try to answer the question, came out with more folks in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket than Trump did. Why do you think that is? I believe that. Why do you think that is? Well, because look, taxes is an important issue.
And I think if you ask any Silicon Valley business person, they say, look, lower capital gains, promote long-term investment. Ask me, that's what I would say too. But you kind of go, well, what actually, in fact, you most need for business is stability, rule of law, not grifter capitalism, where it's like, give me an ability to launch my own NFT, et cetera, et cetera.
That's what they go, we want that. And by the way, we can navigate a higher tax rate. It'll be less fast on growth and everything else, but we can still invest, create businesses, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't do it with kind of a corroding the rule of law. Like, you know, I think both, David, both you and Chamath spoke out against the January 6th stuff. I'm curious where you're on that now.
It's still top of mind for me. That's the reason why the kind of the rule of law thing is my red line, not a tax policy.
Well, let me ask you about that formally here. There are five cases against Trump You have the insurrection case. You have the New York taxes case. You have the hush money case. You have the E. Jean Carroll case. And what am I missing there? Oh, and the documents case. You funded, like Peter Thiel funded the Gawker case, the E. Jean Carroll case, which Trump lost.
And just to ask you, why did you choose to fund that? And do you believe Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll?
Well, it's kind of not relevant whether or not I did or not. What I funded was an ability to have, you know, kind of a woman who doesn't have power, who's being threatened by a rich man with a lot of money and power to try to silence her, to have her day in court where 12 everyday Americans can come to a judgment.
And their judgment was that there was an assault and there was slander about the assault. And they did it twice. And so that was the reason I funded it. And I think that that's important. The laws apply more importantly to rich and powerful people than it does to poor people. That's the important about, the one thing I love about America is a rule of law system.
And I think that's what's most important and that's what's really fundamental. That's my red line relative to the kind of lines in the sand that we're talking about. And that's the reason why in the various kind of lawsuits that seem to be that that's what's being emphasized, then I'm happy to support them.
I don't see how it's rule of law when you have a district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who's elected on a promise to get Trump. He then takes what are at most a bookkeeping misdemeanor that's passed the statute of limitations, that's expired. And he turns into 34 felony charges on a legal theory that was never explained to the jury.
And then basically Trump is convicted in a sham trial by a hyper-partisan New York jury system so that Democrats can then run on the branding that he's a, quote, convicted felon.
So there are four other trials.
I don't think it's rule of law. Hold on. I don't think it's rule of law. I don't want to get Reid's feedback too, but let me just finish my point. I don't think it's rule of law when Trump is prosecuted on a documents charge that Biden himself is guilty of. He's got all these documents in his garage for decades, which the judge has thrown out.
And we've seen a bunch of these lawfare cases where Trump has ultimately prevailed. The judge has thrown it out or he's went on appeal. So that seems to me like abuse of the legal system for a partisan political goal, not rule of law.
Okay, so Reid, there's four other cases, two of them Trump's been convicted in, two of them are outstanding. What's your take on the four cases? You've heard Sachs' take.
So what's the two that he's been convicted, J. Cal? What's the other one besides the Alvin Bragg case?
There's three. Alvin Bragg was convicted. And then the Trump organization with the CFO committing tax fraud. He was convicted in that one as well. Or the Trump organization was convicted. And people say that's lawfare by Letitia James. So guilty, guilty, guilty in those three of five. So what's your take on the four that we haven't discussed yet and heard your opinion on Hoffman?
So, look, I think it's, you know, it's definitely possible to have some versions of law affair, although I think most people use the term when it's the legal process and the law enforcement that they don't like. You know, I think that in the Bragg case, you had, you know, an indictment and 12 jurors. There's jurors, I think, as I recall, one of the jurors said he got
That juror got their principal news from Truth Social. It was a unanimous conviction. I think that you have Vice President Pence who comes out and says, Trump asked me to overturn the election illegally. That's your own vice president. So I don't think that that kind of suggests that there's this rampant political persecution, that there's a lot of fire where there's all this smoke.
It doesn't mean that every single thing
you know, kind of... Democrats are trying to put Trump in jail for 700 years. These cases are still outstanding. They want to put him in jail, Reid. Do you think Trump should go to jail?
I think if he broke laws that says he should go to jail, I think the laws apply to powerful people as much as they apply to everyday people, right?
So I think that's... Why were these cases, why did they wait for two years on these cases so they could bring them in an election year?
Actually, I don't think if you look at the – look, speaking factually, Trump's lawyers are always trying to delay the stuff, right? I think they were trying to follow every legal process and Trump's lawyers keep asking for deferrals.
Maybe he wants to campaign this year instead of being stuck in a courtroom.
Look, after January 6th – This was last year and the year before, asking for deferrals, setting out trial times. Like all of the stuff was from his side trying to delay it. If it got delayed into this year, that's a bad judgment on his part.
Jack Smith just filed new charges, new charges. And all this stems from January 6th. In the wake of January 6th, Merrick Garland's Justice Department did an analysis of whether Trump could be prosecuted for incitement, whether he incited that mob. And the legal memo came back and they said, no, we don't have a case here. It does not meet the legal bar for incitement.
Then it was reported by the New York Times that Biden thought that Merrick Garland was basically being a wimp and they need to go after Trump. So the hyper-partisan DA or prosecutor Jack Smith was hired and he came up with a novel legal theory that somehow Trump had perpetrated a fraud on the American people. Never been seen before.
And since then, he's been prosecuting Trump and seeking to put him in prison. And when the Supreme Court just kicked the legs out from under his case with a recent decision, he just refiled charges. I don't understand how anyone can look at this and say, yeah, look, what happened on January 6th wasn't great, but the DOJ looked at it. It wasn't criminal.
But yet they've been pursuing this guy, seeking to put him away for the rest of his life, seeking to interfere with this election, seeking to deprive the American people of a choice. On a separate track, you've got Democrats in states like Colorado literally removing Trump from the ballot.
Okay, Reid, your thoughts? So, look, the first thing is January 6th, I think, is a red line. I think it's you did incite a riot, whether or not the legal process for it. Let's let Reid finish. Yeah. You know, I was fair enough. Go ahead.
Sorry.
Right. So I think it was the, you know, there was an incitement of a riot. I think that the rioters went in and, you know, killed police officers, were looking to kill Vice President Pence. You know, from the court testimony, courts are the best proxy that we have for finding truth in this stuff.
It's one of the reasons why, you know, by the way, and when, for example, the Supreme Court says, no, that's great. That's legal process.
I just have to fact check that no police officers were killed. Where are you getting that from?
I think there was one died from his injuries very soon after.
No, no, no. There was one cop who had a seizure later. It wasn't part of the riot. No police officers were killed as a part of the riot. I just have to fact check that.
It's just not true. Well, and then there's the one who committed suicide, too, which is a question of causation. I don't know how you can attribute that. Yeah. So anyway, so you got the, you know, the storming of the Capitol. You know, he says these people are American heroes. He's going to pardon them. He's going to hire them into his administration. Right.
And if that's not encouragement for other people doing similar things, you know.
Wait, he's going to hire January 6th rioters? He's going to hire them? Yeah. I haven't heard that.
Well, we'll get you the Trump speech. There's all kinds of wonderful things in Trump speeches.
Let me just move to one thing. So, Reid, I think this has been an amazingly robust conversation. And I think you, as always, as long as I've known you now for 20 years, have been really intellectually honest. I want to ask you a favor, which is, can you stay for 10 extra minutes and talk with us to Bobby Kennedy?
And the reason I want you to do that is I think that there is a bunch of misinformation. I asked you about these things. I think it's important to hear maybe from Bobby and just for him to know what you said, because I do think it's important to hear it from the horse's mouth. Can you just give us like five, 10 minutes so that we can do that? Because I think it would be an important thing to do.
So when is that? No, just right now. Yeah.
We're rolling into an interview with R.F.K. Jr. It wasn't designed this way. The last minute R.F.K. It's just that last minute R.F.K. Jr., who's on vacation, said that he would talk to us about what it was like to kind of withdraw and all this sort of stuff. So we booked it right after you, but he's in the waiting room.
I'm fine to do it. I mean, it's... Totally your choice. Yeah. It's one of the things I like about your all-in podcast is, you know, kind of like, let's try to speak truth. Okay.
Hey, Bobby Kennedy is here. Mr. Kennedy, it's great to have you on the all-in podcast for a second time. May I introduce you to Reid Hoffman, who you may know of, but I don't think you two have ever met.
We have not. Pleasure to meet you. Likewise. Pleasure.
Mr. Kennedy, you dropped out of the race. Perhaps you could tell us, and I was quite disappointed about it. I really wanted to see a third-party candidate get into double digits again. I just want to commend you on the effort that you put into it. Maybe you could tell the audience why you, as a reported never-Trumper, joined the Trump team and dropped out.
So, Jason, I, you know, I'm not actually, I haven't actually terminated my campaign yet. I suspended it. We've taken ourselves, or we're trying to take ourselves off the ballot in about 11 states. So we'll remain on the ballot in 39 states. And all red, all blue states will be on the ballot
in the states where we felt we were going to hurt President Trump with a polling show that we're getting off there, mainly the battleground states. Ironically now, the same people who've been trying to get me off the ballot for a year or since October, are now fighting to keep me on the ballot in those states. So that's one of the sort of ironies.
You know, it became clear about two months ago when it became clear that I was not gonna be allowed on the debating stage. And I pretty much had a shutout in the mainstream media. The mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, in 16 or 17 months, I had only two live interviews. Ross Perot, during his 10-month campaign, had 34 interviews.
And then, you know, all of them were very, very much aligned with the Democratic National Committee. And so when they did mention my name, which was pretty often, it was accompanied by a lot of defamations and pejoratives and slander. mischaracterizations, et cetera. I never really had a chance to reach those audiences. The audiences that I was reaching, I was dominating in.
I was beating all the candidates on independence, which is now the largest demographic. I was beating them among young people, so your audience was supporting me. The audiences that were listening to long-form interviews, I was dominating.
But in the older audiences, which is a critical baby boomers, people who really should have been for me because they are people who, from my generation, who remember the Kennedy administration, they were part of Camelot. They also, I was very, very popular with them for many years when I was the environmental champion alone.
And I should have had good inroads, but I was never able to communicate with them. Because they watch, they get their news from the mainstream media. And if you're living in that information ecosystem, you're going to have a very, very low opinion of me. I mean, if I was getting my information from those networks, I wouldn't vote for myself.
And President Trump reached out to me through this guy, Cali Mains, who's a food advocate, a safe food advocate, about three hours after the shooting in Butler. I got a call from him. And he asked me if I was still interested in the, specifically in the VP slot. And I said, no, which I would not have taken the vice president slot.
And he said, would I talk to, be willing to talk to the administration, to President Trump, rather. And at first I said, no. And I talked with some of my family members, including my kids. And I then sent Kelly Means a note saying, you know, I'm interested in talking. And I got a call almost immediately from President Trump. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with him.
And we met the next day in Minneapolis. And then we met again more recently. We had continuing talks with him. And we met again more recently for a very, very intensive and long meeting at Mar-a-Lago with some of his family members. And during those meetings, during the first meeting,
We talked about the idea of having a unity ticket where I would remain on the ballot, where we would ally ourselves on certain critical issues, but we would be able to continue to criticize each other on the issues that we did not align on. And President Trump was very happy with that arrangement.
And the issues, the critical issues on which we agreed, and I was really stunned to see the level of his commitment to those issues was one. And there are three issues that really got me into the presidential campaign. One was ending the war in Ukraine. The second issue is ending the censorship issue.
And the third issue, and most important to me, was addressing the childhood chronic disease epidemic and these connected issues about soil health and the corruption in our regulatory agencies by USDA and FDA, NIH, CDC, and HHS, which have become sock puppets. for the big pharmaceutical, big ag, big food processing industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
He was very, very much aligned on those issues and it gave us essentially a beachhead in which to construct this, an alliance.
Bobby, let me ask you a question. I just want to go back a little bit because I just want to make sure I heard it properly. When Cali called you Was it to be the VP on the Trump ticket? And did you, was that asked and did you consider it? And why did you say no to that but then said yes to this?
Well, I had no interest in being a vice president. If you're a vice president, it's a, you know, I grew up in politics and vice president is the worst job in Washington. You have no budget. You have no staff except what, your budget actually all comes through the White House. If you do something that offends the president, he can literally, you know, he can take away your plane.
He can take away your staff. And the only thing you really have is the Naval Observatory, which is the official residence of the vice president. And he can essentially put you under house arrest. And, you know, I have very strong views on issues. And I, you know, I felt like if I took that job, I'd be on house arrest probably on day three. So, you know, I was never interested in that.
Reid had to run, but let's just thank him for appearing on the pod. And I thought it was a good conversation. But I thought he approached it in good faith. And kudos to him for stepping into the lion's den. He was great. Yeah.
Sorry, Bobby, keep going.
So, Bobby, let me ask you a question. You are reportedly a never-Trumper. There's massive fallout you cited personally for you as a resident of Malibu, the extremely talented woman you're married to. Based on everything I can tell, maybe not a fan of Trump, so this is maybe causing some domestic and some local town issues for you.
Tell me about your journey from a never-Trumper, all your friends are, I think, never-Trumpers, to now joining with Trump. That's gotta be a hard decision, no?
Yeah, it was a very hard-wrenched decision. But, you know, my whole kind of journey was over the past 17 months was just kind of a series of very, very difficult transitions, you know, away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was... My family is one of the central pillars of the Democratic Party.
My family has been in the Democratic Party since 1848, since my great-grandparents came over. My great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. His contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was a state senator and political boss in Massachusetts. My grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was FDR's treasurer. He was the first head of the SEC.
He was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, deeply, deeply immersed in Democratic Party politics. All of my uncles, Joe Kennedy, who was a delegate to the 1940 convention, who spoke there, a featured speaker, and then was killed in World War II. My uncle John Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president of the United States.
My other uncle, Ted Kennedy, who was one of the longest, I think the second or third longest serving member of the United States Senate, his name on more bills than any other senator in United States history. And then, of course, my father, who was attorney general and A sort of walk away from that party was, you know, I guess it was very, very difficult for me.
And I was actually the last person in my campaign to understand the necessity of that. The Democratic Party was not going to allow me to compete fairly. They had rigged the system against us in ways that were really quite extraordinary. They had just walked away from democracy. They were canceling primaries. They had
They had chosen their candidate and it was going to be President Biden and I was really a nuisance to them. And so my voice was not allowed out there. And so that was difficult. And then leaving, you know, I declared independence in October. And joining Trump, President Trump, I burned a lot of bridges. I burned my boats, let me put it that way.
Clearly, it's definitely a challenging thing to go from your family being the bedrock of the Democratic Party and Trump being obviously seen as an existential risk by the Democratic Party. So what should Americans know about the state of politics and fairness in America based on what you've learned? What do you want the American people to know about the process of selecting a president?
Well, you know, I do want to say that I feel like I didn't really leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me and left the ruins of the infrastructure that I think my uncle and father had, that had made them Democrats. If you went down a list of all of the priorities that Robert Kennedy, that John Kennedy had, I would check every box. They were anti-war, they were anti-censorship.
They were against the corporate control of our country. This corrupt merger of state and corporate power that now has emerged as a dominant governing model in our country. The Democratic Party has changed demographically. When I grew up in a Democratic Party that was the party of the working class in our country, that was a party of Small businesses, that was the party of the poor.
In the last election, President Biden got roughly half of the country voting for him, but that half controlled 70% of GDP. And President Trump got about half the country voting for him, and that half represents about 30% of GDP. So we've had this inversion where the Democratic Party has become the party of wealth, of elites, and I would say very insular elites.
And the Republican Party is now the party of the poor, the working class. And it's been, you know, for me to watch that, I've been on the front lines. of watching it. And, you know, the values that held the Democratic Party together are no longer there. It's held together by a sense of tribalism and a great, great sense of what I would say orchestrated fear of Donald Trump.
It's the only value that really dominates any discussion If I talk about censorship to a Democrat, they'll say, yes, but Donald Trump is going to become a dictator. If you talk about children's health, they'll say, never mind that. Donald Trump is the only thing we can worry about. If you talk about the history of the Democratic Party's opposition to war, they'll say, forget all that.
The only thing we can focus on is Donald Trump. That's a very, very dismaying and, I would say, dangerous form of orchestrated tribalism. And one of the other features of the Democratic Party is this need to control, this mistrust of the plebiscite, mistrust of the demos. You know, demos is a Greek word for people, and the Democratic Party doesn't trust the people.
That's why they have to get rid of elections. That's why they had to get me off the ballot. Oh, my God. I did something everybody said, all the pundits said could never be done. So I got on the ballot in every state. I got a million people that signed their signatures petitioning me on the ballot. And the Democratic Party's strategy, rather than to use the $3 billion it had,
amplify a message and inspire people and talk about a vision and the virtues of its candidates. Instead, use that money to try to get me off the ballot, to get Cornell OS, to get Jill Stein, to use the courts, to use the enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI. to try to rig the election.
And it ultimately comes down to this mistrust of the people, which we're seeing now all over. We're seeing the kind of two big forces emerge. One is a populist force and the other is a force of control, of ironclad control. We saw Europe has already fallen. You saw the arrest of Pavel Durov last week, which was extraordinary.
The arrest of the guy who founded Telegram because he was hosting political dissent. And, you know, the European Commission is already openly censoring content. So they did not need to arrest him. They can take off whatever they want. They went through the trouble of actually, and probably with U.S. encouragement, you know, catching him when he happened to land for a refueling stop in France.
France has this extraordinary tradition of free speech that, you know, began with the French Revolution. And then again in the 1880s, they passed all these incredible laws. their commitment to free speech is as robust as that in the United States. And yet now, you know, and two weeks before that, you had this crazy European commissioner, Thierry Breton,
saying that ordering, ordering Elon Musk to not interview Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, the nominee of one of the two major political parties, and the world is not allowed to hear his point of view. It's extraordinary. That is what's coming to this country, and you can already, and a Democratic Party,
is that the party of control, and it's the party of not trusting the people.
Let's, Bobby, let's talk about something then. Let's assume that this election goes in the direction of now your preferred direction, which is Donald Trump wins. What role would you play? And what is your agenda? What is it that you want to accomplish? And explain, make America healthy again in that context, maybe.
I mean, it's the three issues ending censorship, and that's pretty easy to do. You can do it with a series of executive orders ending the Ukraine war, which is complex, but I think can be done very, very quickly. And then, you know, the food issue. Now, it's food, it's medicines, it's corruption in the regulatory agencies.
But would you be a secretary in that administration? Would you be a special advisor?
There is no, you know, there is no deal in terms of me getting a particular post. Oh, there's just an understanding that there would be some kind of co-governance. And The Trump people have already demonstrated their good faith by inviting me to be on the transition team as one of the co-chairs.
And they've done something really wonderful, which is to bring Tulsi Gabbard in, who shares a lot of my views on this issue as the other co-chair. And I think that's a signal that they're sending that they are sincere about this. I'm making a commitment to these issues.
What should parents know about your thoughts on how to raise kids in a healthy way, make America healthy again? Are there any vaccines that you would say you would advise parents to take for their kids? And how should they look at the industrial food complex? If you were sitting with us as parents, just having lunch, what would you tell us we should do with our own kids?
I mean, the big problem is you can't really trust the government to tell you the truth. The agencies are all compromised. They all have very, very bad conflicts. Almost all the people, for example, on the on the food recommendation committees at FDA are people who are part of the food industry. And the same is true on the pharmaceutical side.
The people who are making decisions about what's good for you are actually people who are making huge amounts of profit on those recommendations. And so you can't really trust that the recommendations are are in your best interest. And what we know is that there is no more profitable, there's no bigger profit center or industry in this country than a sick child.
And a sick child is a lifetime customer, a lifetime consumer of very, very expensive products. And you have this alliance between a food industry and a pharmaceutical industry. to keep our children sick, get them addicted. In the 70s and 80s, the tobacco industry was under attack, and the two biggest tobacco companies went out and bought all the big food companies.
R.J.R. Nabisco, you're referring to.
Yeah, and Kraft. You had Philip Morris buy Kraft. And they took a lot of the scientists from the tobacco industry who are experts on making products addictive, and they put them to work on making food addictive, on making ultra-processed food. So adding ingredients that make food, that destroy the satiability of food so that food doesn't fill you up, so you're always craving more food.
And those products, many of them are products, you know, we have almost a thousand chemicals in our foods that are banned in Europe and banned in other countries. And those products are products that have been introduced by chemists. That did not exist before and the body does not handle them well. And, you know, we're seeing this explosion in chronic disease.
When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. You know what the budget was for chronic disease when my uncle was president? Zero. There wasn't any drugs for it. There was no expenditures on chronic disease. Today, it's $4.3 trillion. It's five times our military budget.
And the people who are making money are the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, which actually you would think insurance companies would want people to be, well, they actually make more money if they're sick. The hospital is the medical cartel. The people we trust to make advice to us about our health are actually compromised. And that's the difficult part.
You've got to unravel that corporate capture.
Freeberg, when you hear this, some people might say, this sounds like a grand conspiracy theory. But Much of it rings true to, I think, many of us who are parents watching kids, you know, and watching the prevalence of obesity, watching pharmaceutical drugs to counter that and all the money that's made from it. And then seeing when people eat clean and they're healthy, maybe there's less there.
So, Freeberg, when you hear Bobby's position here as a scientist who sold a company to Monsanto, climate.com, and who's working on food today. What rings true about what Bobby's saying and what do you disagree with, if anything?
Yeah, there are aspects of industrialized food and processed food that are bad for people. And I do agree, it should be changed. I know a lot of people that work at the USDA, a lot of people that work in other government organizations that don't make a lot of money. They may or may not have worked at other companies, but I think that there's no economic incentive for them to do harm or wrong.
So I don't think that there's a constructive design on doing bad things by any individual. I think that there is an unfortunate circumstance where people eat bad stuff
stuff that tastes better they like it more it sells better and the economic incentive and capitalism is to make more of that stuff and sell more of it and as a result the stuff that people like that isn't good for them they buy more of and the companies make more money and so they continue to invest in selling more and more of that stuff and this goes in most processed foods it's terrible it's not good and so i do agree that much of this processed food industry is um
very adverse to health, but I don't think that there's a grand design by individuals that are malicious in their intent in trying to do it. I think that there are people that are doing their job on, hey, this is what the market wants, let's give them more.
I'm talking about in government and private industry. You don't think people in private industry are trying to make addicting foods?
No, no, I think that, yeah, the point is, like if people buy more of it, they're like, let's sell more of it, you know? Yeah, okay. And if that were illegal, if it was illegal to say, hey, this sort of food product should not be made, but look, alcohol fits the bill too, right? And we keep making alcohol and sugar fits the bill. The more sugar, Coca-Cola did a study years ago
where they kept increasing the amount of sugar in Coca-Cola until they maximally got sell-through. So some kids liked 60 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of Coke, some kids liked 30, but the perfect level was at 42 grams. And so that study was done by the scientists that worked at Coca-Cola, and then they said, that's the product, it'll sell the most. And that's the incentive inside of that company.
That's how that company operates. Now, you could ask yourself the question, is that evil? Is that bad? We now know that sugar in general is bad. The executives at Coca-Cola, at AB InBev, at other places are trying to make alcohol-free, sugar-free alternatives. So there's a lot of push by these people. Unilever has tried to make a big push towards good food. Nestle's tried to do the same.
They've all made these stated commitments to improve the health of the food that they produce. But it is quite difficult to be successful in doing that and returning money to shareholders. The shareholders are like, where's the money?
I think this is the key point you're making, Chamath. I think your clean food effort, and it took me a decade to unravel me eating everything in sight and lose the 40 pounds.
But Chamath, when you hear sort of this back and forth between Bobby and Friedberg, what's your take on it in terms of, and also the European lifestyle that you live for 10 weeks of the year, what's your take on what should happen here and how Bobby can be successful? Yeah.
I think what Bobby says rings true in the way that I live my life and I just see it demonstrated on my own body. You're right, Jason. My wife's Italian. She runs an Italian company. She works Italian and American hours for 10 months out of the year. And for those 10 weeks, we go there and we flip schedule. But when I'm there, I'm consuming Italian produce that isn't packed in plastic.
I go to a local fruit store. I go to the local fish vendor. And my body changes. And I know that because the people that see me when I get back, they always comment, oh, did you lose weight? Oh, do you look thinner or this or that? And what's interesting is I actually do a body composition before I leave and after. I've done this for seven years now.
And I can tell you that my weight doesn't change that much, but my body composition is completely different. And I don't know what it is except the things that I'm putting in my body that's different. And so I see it and I'm running an A-B test every day.
What's the price of the food, Chamath? Is it more in Italy? Do you pay more, do you think? I've already commented on this.
The fish is outrageous. But there are ways to eat at a materially lower price than there is here. And the access to the ultra-processed food is different there. You can't get the stuff. And when you do find that stuff, it doesn't have the same glycemic and metabolic load on your body.
I'm curious what you think of Ozempic and this category of drugs breaking the cycle. I think you've been against them or they certainly helped me with half of my weight loss. I know Saks had a good experience as well and he's been public about it. What are your thoughts on that?
Because it does seem when people take the GLPs, which exist in your body, that they, I'm sure there's more research that needs to be done, they do break this habit. I know anecdotally with me, I don't crave the foods I craved previously, and it did kind of rewire my brain in how I look at food, even when I'm off of it. So your thoughts on those and those potentially being a way to break the cycle?
Yeah, and this goes to David's point that we need to have cheap food and that that is kind of an outcome that is an admirable or virtuous outcome. The problem is that food isn't cheap. It's cheap on the shelf, but it imposes costs on the rest of us that were the externalities that we're paying elsewhere. So when I was a kid,
A typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Over a 40- or 50-year career, one case. It was essentially non-existent disease. Today, one out of every three children who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. When I was a kid, the autism rates were between 1 and 1,500. to 1 in 10,000 Americans.
And that is still true in my generation, 70-year-old men. In my kids' generation, according to CDC, it's 1 out of every 34 kids. Some states, like California, it's 1 out of every 22. 77% of Americans are now, or 74% of adults are obese. Half our kids, obesity... When, you know, 100 years ago, if you were obese, you could get a job in the circus. It was so unusual.
So we're now, and who's making a profit now? Ozempic. Ozempic's not going to. You can, obesity is absolutely, and diabetes are absolutely treatable by good food. That's the cause. Now, Ozempic is a good profit center for pharma. There's a bill now which has been paid for by the company that makes it, which is the biggest company in Europe, Novo Nordisk.
In Denmark, where that company is, they do not recommend it. The treatment of diabetes, the standard of care, is diet and exercise. But that company's entire value is based upon the projections of what it's going to sell in the United States. And that company is pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying to pass this bill that will make Medicare pay for it for every American who's obese.
That could be 74% of people are now eligible. I think it's $1,500 a week. The cost of that will be $3 trillion a year. If you took $3 trillion a year, a tiny fraction of that, you could buy organic food, three meals a day for every human being in the United States. So wouldn't that be a better expenditure of our money?
And, you know, what I would say is the food producers, it's not a conspiracy, it's just... people following perverse incentives. And there are conspiracies.
I mean, when I sued Monsanto, we got emails that showed that the head of the pesticide division, Jess Rowland, for a decade at EPA was secretly working for Monsanto the entire time, sabotaging studies, creating false science to hide the carcinogenic nature of Roundup. So there are those kind of instances throughout the federal government, but mainly it's just perverse incentives.
Almost close to 100% of our agricultural subsidies go to processed food. I mean, go to commodity agriculture, which is the feedstock for processed food.
oh and then if you look at mostly mostly for mostly for me if the industry controls through lobbying and through you know all these other mechanisms for corporate capture controls the expenditures in the food stamp program so seventy percent of the food stamp program goes for processed food ten percent goes for sugar drinks like coca-cola which are just diabetes machines.
So why are we poisoning poor kids in this country? The school lunch program, the same thing, almost 80%, I think 77% of food, the lunch program is terrible foods that are actually poisoning our children. And don't we care enough about our kids to say, we want to care about them, we want to make sure that they're not sick, They are the most precious things in our country.
Shouldn't that be the focus? And whatever we're doing to make them so sick, When I was a kid, 6% of American kids had chronic disease. Today, 60%. Is that not an alarm? Is that not something that we should all be concerned about?
I will agree on an important point. The food stamp program, the SNAP program, provides food stamps to support 42 million Americans. 42 million people rely on food stamps. It costs $120 billion of federal money per year. And as, as Bobby said, the number one product bought on the food stamp program is soda, canned soda.
And there was an important debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda, by the way, Bobby, you and I probably agree on a lot of things. It's definitely a lot of things we don't agree on. But like, these aspects, I think, are just no brainers. There was a debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda should be allowed as a purchase on the food stamp program.
or whether it should be fresh fruits and vegetables and grains and other things. And ultimately there was a food lobbying effort made that kept canned soda on the food stamp program. And it is, again, $120 billion of annual federal spend with the biggest line item going to canned soda to feed 42 million Americans. And the connection is completely direct.
high sugar, high glycemic index, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions arise from that connection. So definitely aligned with you on the misincentives and the disincentives in these programs that have been created. And they only expand every year.
Bobby, can you comment on when people talk about revamping the food supply, one of the things that sometimes is not allowed to be said is that focusing on organic food and produce can exclude certain communities. And so there's like this DEI filter that preferring that is almost racist in some way. Like, can you just comment on that whole vein of thinking and your thought on that?
I think feeding people poisonous food is racist. By the way, the NAACP gets huge amounts of money every year from the food industry. It may be one of the biggest. I think Coca-Cola is the biggest supporter of NAACP. A lot of the NGOs that are supposed to be
Concern about the disproportionate impact on minority communities of federal policies have actually been bought off and bought into the process. And, you know, a lot of times those are the voices you hear saying this is racist. What's really racist is poisoning black Americans because these are communities that are food deserts.
The school lunch program, oftentimes in those communities, the biggest access that they have to food, and we're giving them poison food. Many of these communities have no grocery stores. They definitely don't have Whole Foods. They don't have access to those kinds of foods. Shouldn't we have national policies that... then make sure our people are healthy.
And, you know, they use, of course, market dynamics, but also supports. We're giving billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies for farmers to addict farmers to growing commodity agriculture, which is bad food. It's low in nutrients. It's high in chemicals. It's high in pesticides. And, you know, we need to change these perverse incentives so that and feed America.
You know, how can anybody argue with this? How can anybody say that we should not have healthy children, that we should be giving people food that is hurting them? It's just it doesn't make any sense.
Sacks, any questions for you for Bobby about democracy?
went down with biden the fairness of the democratic party i know you've got some strong feelings on it so i just want to give you your red meat in your window here i'm sure a lot of it's confirming for you what he's saying um and you know i'll be honest i think what the democratic party did to you mr kennedy was absolutely abhorrent and disgusting and it it really is um infuriating to me especially what the mainstream media did
And I'm glad that we got to have you on early on our podcast, at least to let some of your ideas get out there. But let's give Sachs this red meat here because you joining Trump is a wild card. I don't think any of us saw it coming.
Well, let me pick up on those themes, J. Cal. First of all, I want to commend Bobby on running an upbeat and positive campaign. You were and still are the most articulate and powerful champion of free speech over censorship, civil liberties over the surveillance state, peace over war. You've spoken about the issue of chronic health.
which, to be honest, is an issue I didn't know that much about, but I think you've put it now on the political radar screen in a way that it's not going away. So I think you ran a very noble and effective campaign. And I think, like you said, it was a campaign for the soul of the Democratic Party. You know, I think you...
represented issues that in the days of your father and President John F. Kennedy, these would have been Democratic Party issues. How did the Democratic Party respond? They effectively ran you out. They did not give you the chance. They conducted lawfare to keep you off the ballot. They didn't let you debate. I heard your running mates say they even tried to infiltrate your campaign.
And all the while, this party was claiming to be the party of democracy. I find that incredibly hypocritical. I think that if they had given you the opportunity to debate, I think we now know what would have happened. I mean, we saw what happened when Biden actually debated Trump is there's a complete implosion of Biden's campaign.
We discovered that indeed the Democratic Party had been hiding his condition for a long time. And when he was finally forced to debate, didn't have a teleprompter or script, it became extremely obvious. What happened then? They basically put in a new nominee who's never been voted on. Kamala Harris has never received one primary vote. It was done through a process that was opaque.
We still don't know how it went down. I have to disagree with Reid that Biden did it in a voluntary way. Biden went kicking and screaming. I mean, he basically said publicly over and over again, I'm not leaving the race. I'm in this race. He tweeted it. He said it. He said, only God Almighty could get me out of the race.
And then it was reported that Nancy Pelosi went to him and said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
You said God Almighty.
She might be God Almighty. She might be God Almighty. But the point is there was nothing Democratic about this. And now we have a new Democratic Party nominee who refuses to do press conferences, refuses to do solo interviews, refuses to take questions from the press, who's hiding herself effectively. And yet this party, again, claims to be the party of democracy.
I find it just almost maddening or galling again in its hypocrisy. And I just I don't see how everybody can't see through this. It's just not the way that democracy is supposed to work. And I certainly don't think that the people engaging these tactics can be cloaking themselves in all this highfalutin rhetoric of democracy. It's just absurd.
And so I feel like I'm in the place that you are, Bobby. You know, as viewers of this pod know, I did not start off supporting Trump in the primaries. I supported you in the Democratic primary and I did fundraisers for DeSantis and Vivek. And that was in large part because I think of the job that DeSantis did as governor.
But when it came to the general, the realization that I came to is that Trump is the indispensable figure in our current politics for marshalling this populist energy to resist this hypocritical elite authoritarianism that wants to engage in censorship over debate, that
seems to want to protect and defend this surveillance state over anything it wants to do, that wants to keep all these wars going, even when they don't make sense, when we could have found a way to negotiate a diplomatic end to them. And so I'm kind of delighted that you've kind of come around to this opinion, too. I know you have your reservations about Trump.
I'm not saying that Trump is perfect. I mean, I think he's a he's human, he's a flawed vessel, but at the end of the day, he is the choice that represents, again, these populist forces resisting authoritarianism. Sorry, this is more of a statement than a question, but I'll let you react to all of that.
Well, let me react to the last thing you said about President Trump. I think if President Trump wins, that people are gonna see a very different President Trump than they did during the first term. I think he's changed as a person, and I've known him for 30 years. I've sued him, I've litigated against him, and had a friendship with him even when I was litigating against him.
and by the way, successfully against him. But I think he is, he's focused on his legacy. He said many interesting things to me about what he did wrong the last time and about how He had no idea he was going to win. He had no idea how to govern. And people descended on him the day that he got elected and said, you got to appoint this guy, appoint this guy.
And he said, I appointed a lot of people I shouldn't have appointed. I know who they are now. He also said something interesting to me. He said, the Democrats, one of the big sort of fulcrums of their terror of Trump is that He's going to implement this Heritage Foundation, you know, blueprint, which is called Project 2025.
And he brought this issue up to me and he said, you know, they're always telling me I'm for Project 2025. I never read Project 2025 until they started accusing me of it. He said, that was written by a right-wing asshole, is what he said. He said, there are left-wing assholes, and there are right-wing assholes, and it was a right-wing asshole who wrote that thing.
And then he started going through it. So, you know, I think there's a lot. And I think he's interested in his legacy now. He wants to leave behind... some accomplishments. And he wants to make our country better. And I think he's, you know, he's listening to a wider range of voices and he's preparing to govern right now.
And, you know, I'm going to be on the transition committee picking the people who are going to govern Tulsi's gonna be, there's gonna be a wide diversity of stakeholders, but he's listening to more than just that kind of narrow right-wing band that people are terrified of.
It would be great if you could get to him because, you know, he really did present well on this podcast and had like a very good moment in that first half of the RNC. And then he started defaulting back to, and I know a lot of it's like myself, hate this about him. And it's a big part of why we don't like him is he goes back to incel comics, goes back to race, goes back to gender.
And it's just like, dude, we that Trump 1.0 is what people don't want. They don't want chaotic Trump. They want, you know, post assassination attempt Trump. And it's just so infuriating.
Well, a lot of people feel that way, Jake. And I think at the end of the day, you and others are gonna have to decide. Do you want to support the candidate who has the right policies, but maybe there's style points that you don't like about him? Because I think that the things you're talking about, the mean tweets and so forth, at the end of the day, I think they're stylistic things.
I don't think they go deep to policy or how he would govern. Do you want to support a campaign that is running on vibes and joy, you know, that has the superficiality that you like, but there's nothing underneath it. And when we do learn something underneath it, when we actually learn a policy, then all the people who are supporting her have to say, oh, well, she's not really going to do that.
She's not going to do that. So the best thing you can say about her campaign is that she's not going to be able to accomplish the things that she says she wants to accomplish. There's no basis on which to vote for a president.
Good news is I'm in Texas, so I can put in my Bobby Kennedy vote as a protest vote and it doesn't make a difference.
Can I respond to the other part of David's question? Sure. I think, to me, the most troubling thing about what's happening now, you've had two Democratic candidates who've not been able to give unscripted interviews, which is extraordinary.
My father and uncle were so proud of the United States, our capacity to engage in debate, to defend who we were in the world, to defend a vision of our country, to articulate it to the rest of the world, to be the leaders of the free world. and have a command of the facts and of knowledge and to be eloquent. And how can you be a leader in the world?
What does the rest of the world think of us right now? I mean, what could they possibly think? We have two Democratic Party candidates who are not able to explain themselves in an interview. Bill Maris said the other day something really, I think, poignant, which is if you want the job of handling the nuclear code, you've got to do an interview first.
And how can you go 30, 39 days without talking to the press, without being able to defend your record, to explain who you are to the American people? And if you talk to Democrats about this, And you can get past the anger and past the vitriol and this kind of wall of tribal resistance to any new knowledge coming in or any contrary facts.
What they'll say is, well, we're not really voting for Kamala. We're voting for the apparatus. And you ask the next question. Yeah. Has that apparatus served you? Has the open border served you? Has the $35 trillion debt served you? Has the endless wars served you? Has the destruction of the American middle class? Highest inflation rate in a generation.
Has any of that actually, you know, has that apparatus produced something for the United States that you're so proud of that you want to blindly vote without knowing who you're voting for?
Anyway, that's... Well, I mean, Kamala and Waltz will do an interview with Dana Bash tonight, the night we're taping this on Thursday. So we'll see. Maybe she'll miraculously do 10 podcasts and she'll be dynamic. But it certainly doesn't look good that they filibustered with Biden and gave him only most favored nation interviews.
I do respect the fact that we've had so many great candidates come on this pod and have 90-minute, two-hour discussions. I'm very proud of the work we've done here. And Bobby, you were a key piece of that. And we really appreciate you coming on early and having these debates and coming here today to talk about it. Just...
means the world for you to come back and talk about this wish you great success with make america healthy again i think it's incredibly noble independent of how i feel about trump january 6th abortion any of those issues i respect the fact that you want to make america healthy again uh and i wish you great continued success with that and we will see you all next time on the podcast bye
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